


monkey wrench

by portions_forfox



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-14
Updated: 2012-05-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 01:23:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/449692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The longer away from the sun he stays, the colder and colder he gets</i>  |  Ben takes the job in Washington. April comes along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	monkey wrench

**Author's Note:**

> Written for falseeeyelashes' prompt at her Summer Lovin' comment ficathon. Her prompt was, _Sometimes good people do really bad things._

Ben likes to think in terms of black and white. Life's a lot easier that way.  
  
There's a reason he's so good with numbers: when you add one number to another number, there is an answer, one answer, one profoundly unarguable answer that is accurate, and any other answer is wrong. Either you are right or you are wrong. Fifty-three or not fifty-three. Such is life.  
  
And with the rest of day-to-day living it's more or less the same. There are things that will help you succeed in life and things that will not help you succeed in life. Either you learn how to correctly do your own laundry or you don't—one will help you, one will not. (Also, one means you're an idiot—a sweet, lovable idiot with an admirable dedication to green frisbees, but an idiot all the same.)  
  
People do not break from the patterns in his mind. Ben sees things in black in white, and this is how it works: there are good people, and then there are bad people.  
  
He likes to think he is one of the good people.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(They say the only part of life that truly stays the same is this: things change.)  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Pre-Leslie, Ben kept up a subliminal tally of Good People versus Bad People. On the Good People side, he had Chris, and his sister, and that guy he saw at the bus stop trying to get people to vote. On the Bad People side was everybody else. There was a startling discrepancy between the two, so startling, in fact, that Ben's not startled at all. Most people, he concludes with all the smug objectivity of what they call a  _numbers guy_ , are bad.   
  
And then.  
  
And then there is Leslie Knope, who marches into his life with a smile and a cup of coffee that's not so much coffee as it is coffeed-down whipped cream in a mug, and ... and he wants to believe there's something ironic in the way he thinks to himself that she's the fucking human equivalent of the sun, bright rays and yellow hair and blatant beaming optimism, but then he realizes almost like an epiphany that there's nothing ironic at all about that, and then he falls in love.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
One of the few things they teach you in school that actually seems to make sense is that the sun has a way of warming those around it.  
  
By this same logic, every single employee of the Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department is added to the Good People list in the back of Ben's mind. Ann, good. Donna, good. Ron, Tom, Andy, good. Hell, even Jerry, despite his inherent awfulness, seemed to be a decent enough guy.  
  
But patterns are meant to be broken the same way rules are, with a crash and a fall and a rebel. Someone who doesn't fit.  
  
Somewhere buried subliminally, Ben's brain can't figure out what the fuck to do with April Ludgate.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Leslie wins the election, and when Ben says he never wrote her concession speech he means it. Hard as he tried, reaching into that part of him that once concluded mankind was cruel, he couldn't bring himself to believe she would lose. (The sun has a way of warming those around it. Leslie rubs off.)  
  
He wants to kiss her. He wants to kiss her every day for the rest of his life because he can't believe he landed a woman like her, that he of the scowl and the resolved misanthropy would get  _her._  
  
"We'll make it work," beams Leslie. He takes the job in Washington.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
( _What happens when you step away from the sun?_ ask your teachers in school.  
  
 _You get cold_ , is the answer.)  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
On the day before he leaves he hears a knock on his bedroom door, which throws him off because knocking is not a thing that people do in this household.  
  
"Come in," he says, only it's more like  _Come in?_ , a question, because he's really bad at hiding his confusion.  
  
April opens the door and Ben blinks at her, freezing halfway bent over the suitcase he's packing on the bed. She sighs out a long breath, blowing strands of dark hair off her forehead, and leans against the door-frame with her arms folded. She tilts her head upward—annoyed, like always—and huffs.  
  
"Was there something you wanted to ask me?" Ben wants to know, his good old friend sarcasm coming out to play, "or did you just come in here to angst at my ceiling."  
  
April rolls her eyes, which, okay, should've been a semi-foreseeable response.  
  
" _No_ ," she scoffs, pushing off the wall with her hands and falling back to it. "I have to ask you something. It's like, really important or whatever."  
  
Ben waits for her to continue, and when she doesn't, he raises both eyebrows and jerks his head, like,  _yeah?_  
  
"I need you to drive me with you to D.C. tomorrow," she deadpans (which actually, come to think of it, is  _all_ she ever does when speaking.)  
  
Ben goes absolutely still, which is his perfectly instinctual response.  
  
"You what?"  
  
April groans and rolls her eyes up to the ceiling. "Are you deaf?" she wonders. "I said I need you to drive me with you to D.C. tomorrow."  
  
"I don't—" Ben says; then, attempting to wipe the bewildered look off his face, he tries to start from the beginning. "Why."  
  
"Because I got a job offer, too."  
  
"What for."   
  
"Reviewing."  
  
"Reviewing what."  
  
"Bands in D.C."  
  
"What bands in D.C."  
  
"I don't know, God, just—" and she heaves a sigh, like that's a suitable reply.  
  
"I didn't know you even ... reviewed. Bands. Reviewed bands."  
  
"Yeah, well, I don't like, go around telling people about my life."  
  
"What about Andy?"  
  
April's face is blank, just as unreadable as ever. "We talked about it."  
  
"And he's okay with this?"  
  
"I don't need his permission, chauvinist," April spits, pushing off the wall and taking a few disconcerting steps toward him, then she evidently feels as disconcerted as Ben does, because she stops. Crosses her arms again. "Look, he's—he's like, sad or whatever, but he wants me to do what I want. So ... I'm going. Are you gonna take me or what?"  
  
"I didn't—April, I ..." Ben runs a hand through his hair and exhales slowly. It's a lot to take in. "How long are you gonna be there?"  
  
"Like six months."  
  
"Six mo—so, same as me, then."  
  
"Yeah. Same as you."  
  
Ben throws his arms out and slaps both hands onto his hips. He looks out the window at Pawnee, sunny, bright little Pawnee, and then back at April, who is scowling. Weird how it seems to suit her.  
  
"Whatever. Fine, okay. I'll drive you."  
  
"Finally," says April, and leaves the room.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Leslie's busy preparing for inauguration (reading up on the statute of 1698 and whatnot) so that night Ben eats dinner with Andy and April. (The Dwyers, he's heard them called, believe it or not, but for a couple of reasons he rejects this epithet—one, they're too immature to have a family title; two, they're too young to be a family; and three, he's not sure  _April Dwyer_ has a ncie ring to it at the moment. He's not sure it ever will, but that's a separate issue.)  
  
Andy tells a story that was passed on to him by Mrs. Ludgate, whose enthusiasm for life seemed unlikely given her two daughters. Apparently when April was in seventh grade, she slowly cultivated a notion among her classmates— _Inception_ -esque, Ben thinks—that the skinniest girl in their class was actually the fattest.   _Look at her ankles_ , she'd muse to another girl,  _Don't you think they look a little round?_ Eventually the girl ran home sobbing, was home-schooled for the rest of her K-12 years and developed an eating disorder to boot.  
  
 _Bad_ , Ben's brain decides,  _bad person_ ; but then April grins at Andy and he glows, moves his palm to cover hers, and Ben's confused all over again.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Ben likes to think in terms of black and white. Life's a lot easier that way.  
  
In art class they tried to teach him that there were different tones and shades of color, that even the fullest shade of midnight blue could be tinted to a whispery baby's breath, that even the loudest tint of candy-apple red could be shaded to a thick blood crimson. But Ben wouldn't have it:  _Blue is dark and red is light_ , he said, and the art teacher sighed.  _It doesn't work like that, Benjamin,_ she said, but really, really it does.  
  
People are no different. There are smart people, and then there are dumb people, and just like if you put a good person with a bad person and watch them simmer they'll eventually boil, and after they boil they'll bubble over, and after they bubble over the lid will topple off the pot and the fire in the stove will go out and then you'll just have one big fucking mess.  
  
Leslie is smart and Ben is smart. Ann and Chris are smart, and even Tom, in his own way. Donna, Ron, Jerry—well, Jerry's all right with computers, so.  
  
Ben never thought he'd be the type of person to make friends with an idiot, but Andy—Andy is unceasingly, incorrigibly, endearingly an idiot.  
  
That doesn't mean Ben would marry him.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(One thing they taught in school is that dark colors show up better, are hard to paint over, fade away only slowly.  
  
In the car April leans back into her seat, closes her eyes and turns on her iPod, and beneath the tinny thrum of the speakers he can hear she's listening to Nirvana.  
  
 _Smart choice_ , he wants to say, but the first word fizzles on his tongue.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
When Ben pulls onto the exit ramp for D.C. it's dark outside. He reaches over with one arm and shakes April's shoulder till she wakes.  
  
"Well," he says, a little annoyed, "I know you've got your whole not-going-to-talk-to-me-for-the-whole-car-ride thing going, but I do actually need to know where you'll be staying, so."  
  
April blinks sleep away, and it strikes Ben acutely how different she looks when she's just waking up, eyes large and brown and everything soft around the edges. She suddenly looks younger.  
  
She adds to this sentiment by answering, low and quiet and gravelly, "I don't know, I figured I'd just find a place once I got here."  
  
 _That's not how it works,_ Ben starts to say, opens his mouth to do it, too, but she's looking around the car and gathering her thoughts and not at all scowling and there's no trace of boredom, of apathy, just April.  
  
Ben thinks in terms of black and white, structured, systematic, patterned. So when a thought rolls along that doesn't seem to match with the pattern, something like,  _I am so, so much older than her, aren't I,_ he needs a moment to collect himself, and his knuckles grip the wheel.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
"I'll just stay with you for a few days, then," April yawns, like it's nothing, like this is a perfectly acceptable and common suggestion.  
  
Ben gets out of the car and slams the door shut, hands finding his hips. April yawns again and stretches her arms out towards the sky, leaning against the side of the car. The sallow light from the gas station overhead makes her cheekbones look darker than they really are.  
  
"April," Ben starts cautiously, squinting his eyes at the back of her head, "I'm not sure that's such a good idea."  
  
She takes her time in turning around, and seems entirely indifferent to the situation when she does. Somehow she knows the only word that Ben can't move across: "Why?" she asks, quick and with a feigned but still convincing air of innocence. Convincing in the sense that Ben knows he can't point out it's a lie.  
  
The answer to why April living with him might not be a good idea is an answer Ben's not allowed to speak out loud, not even allowed to  _think_ about, so he doesn't give it.  
  
Instead he crowds into the gas station bathroom and calls Leslie, trying not to touch any bare surfaces while he's at it ( _That's filthy_ , his mother would say) as he hisses his dilemma into the phone.  
  
Leslie laughs, light and warm, and says, "Ben, I think it's a great idea. You can help April become a responsible adult and get her own apartment, and until then you won't have to be so lonely without me." Ben doesn't point out that the notion that  _April Ludgate_ might be the temporary replacement for Leslie is a bit of a fucking joke, but he's thrown at the mention of it all the same.  
  
"Are you sure?" he asks, and he realizes Leslie's not even thinking about the obvious reason a normal human being wouldn't do this, wouldn't move in with a younger (much, much younger) woman while alone on a longterm business trip halfway across the country from his girlfriend. It hasn't even occurred to her. He realizes suddenly, sickeningly, that  _he's_ the only one thinking about it.  
  
"Yes, of course I'm sure!" Leslie insists, and Ben's starting to feel cold already.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(The old pessimist in him still believes in certain things, certain things like the mantra his optimist mother used to recite to him, day after miserable, miserable day:  _When you expect the worst, the worst occurs._ )  
  
This is how it works:  
  
Ben gets home at five and drags his feet into the kitchenette, shuffles around in the cupboards and fridge for some fruit or bread or fuck, even some Wheat Thins, but all he finds is box after box of Fruit Roll-Ups and Pop-Tarts, Toaster Strudels in the freezer and leftover takeout in the fridge.  
  
"What do you even  _do_ while I'm gone?" he calls into the next room, where April is lounging on the couch with her laptop on her thighs and a sack of chips at hand.  
  
"I watch gay porn and masturbate," she shoots back in a flat tone, and Ben winces and silently admits he'd kind of set himself up for it.  
  
At around nine he hears the front door creak open and slam shut, and then he's momentarily awakened again at four or five in the morning to the sound of it creaking open and slamming shut again. Those are April's hours, nine to five, only considering it's April she's got it ass-backwards.  
  
And it's a little bit funny, Ben knows, how quickly they fell into this routine. How little adjusting it took for him to remember that between 10:15 brushing-his-teeth and 10:30 crawling-into-bed he's got 10:20 revising-the-grocery-list, crossing out Nutella and Fruity Pebbles for peanut butter and Corn Flakes. How easy it is to buy two tubes of toothpaste even though he knows April will end up using his anyway just to bother him. How effortless it feels adapting to another warm body in the apartment—he'd lived with her before, of course, but in much larger quarters, and never one-on-one, never so dependent on each other.  
  
She pays her rent every month, to the cent, and exactly on time. Ben would be lying if he said he wasn't a little bit proud of her.  
  
"Do you have a roommate?" he'll hear at work sometimes, and he'll say "Yeah," and not elaborate, and if they press him for details he'll shrug and say, "A friend of my girlfriend's," and stop there.  
  
He calls Leslie at around dinnertime every night while he's in the kitchen meticulously cooking spaghetti or chicken breast, the only two meals in his repertoire. It cheers him up to hear her voice, to feel the sun leaking through the clouds. She's on top of the world in City Council, making so much progress already and stomping on the feet of all the old-man assholes for whom she somehow still has a soft spot.  
  
"He's not so bad, really," Leslie defends as Ben laughs darkly at a comment some guy had made about women's brains fewer  _mind grapes._ "Just a little misguided."  
  
"In what direction is he being guided, senility?"  
  
And Leslie laughs.  
  
Ben never used to be the type to use hyperbole in everyday speech (needless to say, he fucking  _hated_ Shakespeare) because his implicitly rational nature made it hard for him to accept that  _Beverly Kissel had, like, the biggest tits in the entire world, man._ It seemed to him a pretty stupid way to give a compliment, one so big it became meaningless.  
  
But Leslie's laugh—Leslie's laugh was the best laugh in the entire world, man.  
  
"Ben, hurry the fuck up already!" April calls from the other room, banging two forks savagely on their tiny dinner table as a manifestation of her constant impatience.  
  
"Oh, that's April yelling, I've got to go," Ben sighs, shaking the drainer of pasta over the sink.  
  
"Oh, I thought—oh," says Leslie, her tone of voice rapidly shifting into something Ben can't place.  
  
"What?" he returns. "What is it?"  
  
"It's nothing, I—never mind, have a good dinner."  
  
"No seriously Leslie, what is it? I want to know." Ben sets down the drainer and puts both hands on his hips, leaning the phone between his head and shoulder. (Something tells him this pose is kind of effeminate, so he puts a solid, manly hand onto the phone.)  
  
"I just—" Leslie starts, sounding like she wishes she hadn't brought it up at all. "I didn't know you ate dinner together, that's all."  
  
Ben is quiet for just a moment. "Well, we don't, usually," he answers, trying to liven his tone—it's the truth, after all. "Just—" and he starts to say  _When we can_ , but somehow the words kind of choke coming out of his mouth. It makes it sound like they're purposely putting aside time for each other, which they're not, he wouldn't put aside time for April, it's just—  
  
"Well listen, it's not a big deal, that's actually kind of awesome," Leslie asserts, and she really does sound like she means it. Come to think of it, she probably does. "But we should talk longer next time, okay?"  
  
That sentence unintentionally highlights it, doesn't it. The fact that Ben's hanging up on Leslie to eat dinner with April.  
  
"Yeah," he says, "Yeah, okay," and then after about five more  _I love you_ s he hangs up the phone.  
  
April has stopped banging her forks and is looking at him strangely when he emerges from the kitchen with the spaghetti and sets it down on the table.  
  
"Was that Leslie," she asks (only none of her questions end as though they're questions—she doesn't really  _do_ inflection.)  
  
"Yeah," Ben answers, and she leaves it at that. Ben kind of likes that about her.   
  
"This fuckin' spaghetti is fuckin' amazing," she tells him some time later, with an openly chewing mouth, and Ben grimaces to hide a smile.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(Ben remembers the time just after he moved in when he tried to teach Andy how to make spaghetti. The water simmered till it boiled, and after it boiled Andy forgot about it (X-box distractions) and it bubbled over, and after it bubbled over the lid toppled off the pot and the fire on the stove went out and then they just had one big fucking mess.  
  
April is a surprisingly attentive learner, and she makes his mother's recipe exactly right on the very first try.)  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Ben tried to get Leslie to read  _The Bell Jar,_ but she wouldn't because it was too sad. It was pretty much the only sore spot in their relationship that still held for him, because of ... reasons. He'd first read the book after his failed attempt at mayor, when everyone seemed to look at his life like a comedy of errors, a joke that was only funny because it was such a fucking disaster. But what they didn't seem to realize was that this was Ben's  _life_ , and he had to live as a character in this comedy of errors where everything kept going wrong until the wedding cake falls over or somebody farts, and the joke didn't end, because he was living it. He was living a joke. It wasn't so funny to him. In fact, it kind of sucked.  
  
So he got depressed, and as all properly depressed people do, he read  _The Bell Jar_ , which, even  _that_ he couldn't do in peace because his brother said it was a girly book and his sister agreed and his mom said,  _Ben, why don't you just read John Grisham like a normal kid, all right_? But. He wasn't a normal kid. He was an utterly hopeless, clinically depressed twenty-one-year-old failed mayor.  _The Bell Jar_ was his thing.  
  
All his life he'd kept a copy hidden away in the bottom of his drawer, and even though post-Leslie it didn't seem to apply anymore, he still wanted her to read it, because it had meant something to him once and she meant something to him now. He thought he'd finally found someone who'd understand.  
  
But there are points of contention in any relationship—they're to be expected, Ben knows, even when you're dating the fucking sun. (That's the thing, though—the sun doesn't know what it's like at night. Doesn't know that side of things, does it. Unless that's just some fucktard metaphor and Ben's just some fucktard thirty-five-year-old failed teen mayor.)  
  
"That book's so saaaaaaaad though," Leslie whined, and Ben eventually accepted this, accepted that this was something you could live with when you love someone this much. Maybe  _The Bell Jar_ was just one of those things—there were so many for Ben—that he did alone.  
  
But.  
  
He shuffles into the apartment one Thursday night. Takes off his jacket and hangs it by the door, tosses his keys into the bowl on the counter. Is about to drag his feet into the kitchen when impulsively he glances over at April, who is sitting by the window.  
  
Her feet are folded up under her side, her knobby knees bent one on top of the other. Gray sun streams in through the open window and bathes her face in a faint, gloomy sort of light, fuzzy but beautiful all the same. The lines of her face, the threads and strings that hold her together are shallow, relaxed, and the rounded almonds of her eyes are reflecting the pale sunlight. A breeze rolls in, and the shortest, smallest strands of hair framing her forehead lift and sway, back and forth. One hand is curled around the armrest, and the other is clutching his copy of  _The Bell Jar._  
  
"How long've you been reading that?" Ben blurts out, more bewildered than angry or embarrassed or anything else he should be right now.  
  
April looks up, and Ben is surprised by how odd it is to see her actually looking  _guilty_ , like she's been caught in the act (of rooting through his stuff and stealing his girly novel, that is), rather than callous and unfazed as April should be.  
  
"Just today," she replies, closing the book but keeping one sly finger in her place.  
  
Ben steps closer, tentatively. He isn't really sure how to act right now. "I thought you—" he starts, looking confused; then he clears his throat and continues, "I thought you only read, like ... catalogs and magazines."  
  
"You and everyone else," says April, but her voice doesn't come out as bitter or as flat as Ben suspects she wants it to. Instead, she sounds satisfied and disappointed all at once, like that's what she wants them to think but she doesn't know why.  
  
"Okay," Ben says. "Okay." And before he can stop himself, "Do you like it?"  
  
April bites her lip, and in the fading light her teeth look like tiny pearls in a row. Then she smiles.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(Pluto, they say, is the farthest planet from the sun, therefore it is the coldest. It got so cold it's not even a planet anymore.  
  
People, Ben decides, work more or less the same way.)  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Ben wants to believe that normal roommates set aside time to eat dinner together every night. That normal roommates do the grocery shopping together, one pushing the cart and one riding it. That normal roommates spend Saturday afternoons falling asleep on the couch tangled up in each other after SNL reruns on VH1 get old. He wants to believe all of that.  
  
He wants to believe that it's normal for one roommate to flinch when the other's phone goes off and the name lights up, bright and incriminating,  _Leslie Leslie_ , or for one roommate to do the same when the other's custom Mouserat ringtone goes off, signifying the one and only person it belongs to, her husband.  
  
(Husband. Husband. Husband, husband,  _husband_. Sometimes Ben thinks the word so many times, over and over and over in his head, it becomes just too foreign syllables devoid of meaning. He finds he likes it better that way.)  
  
Ben wants to believe a lot of things.  
  
He wants to believe he is still a good person.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
When April finishes  _The Bell Jar_ , some four or five weeks later (April is a slow reader, not because she can't read fast, but because—and Ben finds this out from observing her turn pages on the couch—she wants desperately to understand the letters forming into meaning on the page), she opens the door to his bedroom at 2AM on a Sunday night (Monday morning?) and stands there in the dark, just a silhouette Ben's struggling to convince himself is real.  
  
"What?" he says, lifting his head off the pillow, his voice sounding unfamiliar and hoarse.  
  
She steps closer so the light from the hallway filters in, shadows expanding across the dip of her collarbone, the sweep of her shoulders. "I finished the book," she says, and sounds different too, hoarse but not from sleep.  
  
Ben squints his eyes into the dark, and his stomach twists into a knot when he sees her face (twists for too many reasons than he cares to understand, twists like a premonition), because she's crying, April Ludgate is crying. Which is not supposed to happen.  
  
Ben is frightened when he feels the words slip from his lips, sounding foreign still, this time because he can't believe he said them: "Come here."  
  
She does. Crawls into bed beside him, under the covers and curls against his body. Ben slides an arm around her shoulders as he feels her head thump onto his chest. (It's funny, Ben thinks, how little adjusting it takes.)  
  
"I feel weird," April whispers, like it's easier in the dark, just the two of them. "Like I didn't get how real life works until now."  
  
Real life. It sounds like such a long time ago that he learned how such a thing works, good people and bad, light colors and dark. Smart people and fucktards. He's almost forgotten how right he was— _It doesn't work like that_ , Leslie would say, but it really, really does. Black and white. It's easier that way.  
  
"Ben?" April's saying, and Ben looks down at her face, thinks to himself,  _I know this is my own damn fault_ , and kisses her.  
  
When he comes inside her, shaking, heaving, grasping, the skin of her hips beneath his fingernails and the curve of his back beneath hers, he whispers her name,  _April_ , and wishes it had been Leslie's. Somehow that would make this simpler, wouldn't it—if it had been Leslie's name that was torn from between his gritted teeth like a revelation, if he'd really, truly wanted her right then.  
  
But he didn't.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(The longer away from the sun he stays, the colder and colder he gets.)  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
He wants her less and less nowadays, and April more and more. Thrusting her into the kitchen counter almost like it's a vengeance,  _This is what you get for making me love you._ Watching himself carefully tear away every mask she's got until she's a blubbering mess of a little girl, begging and pleading and gasping his name, squirming under his torturously slow hand on the bed. His hands too rough, too firm on her hips as he pounds into her from behind. They'll bruise.  
  
But he lets her do the same, in her own way. They'll be in the kitchen searching for lunch, when suddenly Ben feels a hand throwing him into the wall and April sinks to her knees and takes him in her mouth, just like that, sudden and warm and pumping quickly, her hands on his hips to stop him from bucking. She winds him up fast, mouth moving in rapid strokes from base to head, and just as his fingers start to tighten in the back of her hair and pull her mouth even farther down his shaft she'll yank off, wander into the next room without a word.   
  
Her way is crueler.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
(They made love once. They'd spent Saturday at the old-time movie theatre watching  _Casablanca_ or some hopelessly romantic film like that, and when Ben looked across at her as they walked down the street she was smiling, head tilted up towards the sky and purely, unbearably April. He kissed her softly then, hands on each side of her face and chest to chest, like in the movies, like how he used to kiss Leslie. Should still kiss Leslie.  
  
When it was over they both knew they wouldn't (couldn't) do it again, not because it had been terrible but because they were desperately, cripplingly afraid they would never be able to stop.)  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
April leaves him before he gets the chance to leave her.  
  
It's just for one weekend back with Andy in Pawnee, but somehow they both know as she packs up her bags and slips out the door with an awkward goodbye that she won't be coming back. In the metaphorical sense, anyway.  
  
"Leslie says she misses you," she tells him when she gets back from the daytrip, and he kind of hates her for it.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Ben thinks in terms of black and white. Life's a lot easier that way.  
  
He is a good person who did a bad thing, and he will atone for that bad thing by kissing Leslie like in the movies every day for the rest of his life.  
  
April is a smart person who married an idiot, and it worked out fine for them. More or less, anyway.  
  
People do not break from the patterns in his mind, except for that one time they did.  
  
 _It doesn't work like that_ , they'd say, but it really, really does.


End file.
